Aneesh Nair

I would like to share one of the amazing success story of a Serial Innovator who had developed a Smart Bag primarily for school going kids!!

The Innovator, Aneesh Nair who is an IIT alumni has been working on many ideas but one of his idea, a Smart Bag which is GPS enabled so that the parent can track movement of the child, has an inbuilt weighing scale so that if the weight exceeds the permissible limit then it will beep and the coolest thing which I found is the facility to download one’s timetable on the bag so in case you have a Maths class on Thurs. for example and you forget to put Maths book then it will alert you to put the same.

The Smart Bag was displayed at IIT Tech Fest which caught the attention of a Times of India reporter and subsequently a story was featured in Mumbai Mirror (link: ) and followed by other media such as India Today, NDTV etc.

Also parallely he had used the services of a Market Research professional to estimate the market size and found out that it should be a Rs.300 crore (apprx. USD 55 million) market in India.

Because of the media attention, he started receiving a lot of inquiries from those in the trade, businessmen etc. and he landed up transferring his technology to an established retailer in the apparel space for a period of 3 years with a one time payment and royalty on sales.

One of the other smart thing he did was to ensure that the supply of electronic components in which he trades is bought exclusively from him since he runs a firm dealing into electronic components.

And also to my surprise, there was no patent filed for this innovation so the buyer is looking at first mover advantage and know how of the Innovator who will work with them to make sure it is launched in the market.

The example clearly illustrates that a good idea especially in the consumer product space with visible media attention can help an Innovator have buyers queuing up to buy the innovation.